I’m on an adventure!  I am currently in Ireland for the weekend visiting with some Martial Arts friends for a Filipino Martial Arts Seminar.  Why Ireland?  Well the owner of the school I teach out of in Weymouth is actually IN Ireland and a bunch of us from around the world are meeting up in the Home School in Waterford (Yes..  where they make the Crystal).

So here I am on a bus from Dublin to Waterford (a 3 hour ride) after flying in from Boston (a 6 hour flight) soaking in the beauty of this wonderful place and desperately hoping to find good coffee soon!  This is my first visit to the Isle and really, it is breathtakingly beautiful!  I would have been unprepared for this amazing vista if I had not spent some time in Devon staying with my sister who lives there now with her husband and two lovely sons.  Devon and Cornwall are incredibly beautiful places perhaps on par with Ireland but all breathtaking int heir glory and history!

And yes…  It is FUCKING Green here!   *grin*

This place is an interesting mix of very old and very new.  There are cliches everywhere you look but you realize that they are not Cliche here… they are the original!  Whether it’s a faded glowing “Shamrock Bar”, or the perpetual “Guinness for Strength” posters, it all seems part of the place here.  Ancient buildings older than the country I come from are nestled beside now construction and ultramodern, IKEA-esque facilities.  And Roundabouts…lots of roundabouts.

The other thing I notice about spending time in other countries is that there is a set of dominant smells for things.  Some smells are universal mind you.   You know when you pass by a farm because the smell of manure and top soil is the same all over.  But the smells of people and things change.  The women on the bus wear a collection of perfumes I don’t recognize.  A very helpful stewardess on the flight in who resat me in a row that was largely empty because she saw I was crammed in next to another gentlemen on a two seat row had a very distinct cologne on that accentuated the fact that she was portugese working on an Aer Lingus flight.

I had noticed this same effect in Shanghai where people were wearing deodorants and perfumes I did not recognize and it because very noticeable that I was not in Kansas anymore.

Well my absence from posting is partially due to a crazy travel schedule of late.  In September I spent a week in China visiting with our development team there.  Prior to the trip I had to madly go about and get my passport renewed and as I am Canadian that has a set of additional complications as well.  So a mad trip back to Canada, then a flight down to NY to get a Visa from the Chinese consulate, then off to Shanghai!  Woot!  I must say that the Canadian Passport office were incredibly helpful and friendly even

 I will have many pictures to share soon but the short precis here is that Shanghai is a first class, amazing city that is ready for business!  Our team there is simply top shelf and I am incredibly excited about working with them on various projects and of course spending time in Shanghai in the future.

 I do have to comment here on the food.  We went Native pretty much the entire trip and simply had increible food every single meal.  Even breakfast at a little corner store was great and unique!  It certainly was adventurous at times and defiantely very SPICEY but wow, am I ever spoiled now for chinese food!  *grin*

Shanghai was a showcase of many different styles of cooking.  We had Taiwanese, Schezeuan, Cantonese and even Shanghaiese!  Each had signature dishes but they all were served Family Style and typically the meal extended over a fairly long period of time.  The dishes typically were small, slightly larger than “Tapas” but there were many and one sampled across many of them.  It was an amazing way to eat and socialize and I can see how eating together is a critcal part of conducting business there.

Quick Update on the Birthday Bash.  The Ribs were EXCELLENT!  I had two grills going, one being my Gas Weber (Old Faithful) and a cheap Charcoal unit we picked up at Home Despot this summer.  I used natural lump charcoal and the heat was AMAZING..  almost too much really..  But the ribs did great in both cases.  Definately looking forward to doing that again.

Well I have just come back from lunch at a local restaurant and as I sit here happily digesting my order of Schezuan Chicken my thoughts drift to the glories of food, it’s preparation, and consumption.  This weekend I will be cooking for a gathering of my friends as they help me celebrate my 40th Borthday and I will have the distinct pleasure of cooking for them.  In specific I will be BBqing for them and am looking forward to making Baby Back Ribs! 

 Great ribs atart with a great rub and my favorite food expert in all of the world, Alton Brown, has a great recipe on the food network site here: http://www.foodnetwork.com/food/recipes/recipe/0,1977,FOOD_9936_11125,00.html

Now for those unfamiliar with Mr. Brown I encourage you highly to check out his show on the Food Network called “Good Eats”. He is witty, brilliant, entertaining and generally highly entertaining and you will learn a great deal about food. also his books are outstanding and highly recommended for your Kitchens Library.

Recently I spent some time in a room with some very smart people discussing what SOA means to our company.  The questions that first emerged was how do we define SOA beyond a string of technologies like REST, SOAP, XML, JSON, POX, WS-*, etc.

 It turns out that defining SOA is pretty hard and “The Industry” has not really agreed upon a common definition.  We have a number of attributes that we associate with Service Oriented offerings but we don’t have a definitive “Litmus Test” for it.

This is not surprising as “Object Oriented” never had a completely settled defintion and many different experts debated what were the set of properties that defined a truly “Object Oriented” language/application/environment, etc.

 SOA does have some key characteristics though:

1. It supports heterogenous applicaitons – Applications that are comprised os several different technologies / languages. 
2. It encourages Componetization of functions – Developers are pushed towards making compoenents that have clean interfaces and not relying on Global Address Space (because it does not exist!)  and thus the resulting Components are typically more reusable and discreet.
3. It can be deployed across several different transportation layers – Although really HTTP is the most dominant form, it could be SMTP, it could be TCP, it could be Jabber! 
4. XML is going to be used – F’get about it!  No matter what you use, even REST, XML is going to play a role in the component conversation.

I have been reading a great book that focusses on REST and it’s approach to Web Services which I can highly recommend called RESTful Web Services.  Catchy Title huh!  It is from O’Reilly Press and as is the case with almost everything from that organization it is very well done.   

Oh wait…  Someone already used that…  Sorry….

 How about:  Greetings!

Welcome to my Musings!  A collection of my thoughts on Software, Martial Arts, Cooking and anything else I can think to write about.  Come on in, pull up a virtual chair and stay awile..  I make great soup and killer coffee!